Rouse Family Adventures

Things have been busy out here  building a building and a new community of people. We've made it through two holidays, a hog roast with 50 people we didn't know and a six year old  bouncy house birthday party at a tap house. I also attended a neighborhood ladies night where I listened to some lady tell me the medicinal uses of crystals and some other woo woo shit about sound waves and carcinogenic effects of light pollution. Being the new kid on the block really has really been enlightening.  Lucikly for us, Annabelle continues to make all our friends and is really slaying it at school. We started out the school year by walking a mile each way to the bus stop wondering why everyone else was driving. When the weather hit 23 degrees we started driving too.  She is learning to read and is starting to write pretty amazing stories like, " I see a dog. The dog pooped". If she keeps it up she might be ready to take on the responsibility of my blog soon.  We've been eat...

 Annabelle started kindergarten the first week of September. The best part of day one was when they got to watch TV because the music teacher called in sick. Her favorite special class in school is helping out in the school garden because "she gets to eat more". She's learned a lot of valuable lessons at public school so far. For instance, if you lick the bottoms of your feet you get better traction climbing up the slide. There are lots of aspects of public school that seem similar to a prison yard at first glance, but somehow it works ands she loves school so much that she plays kindergarten with her stuffies on her weekends off. I formally quit my job the same day Annabelle started school upping my status to trophy wife. So far so good. I'm not eating government cheese yet, but have the van ready with a nice spot by the river picked out if it comes to that. I've been volunteering in art class at Annabelle's school and working on building our project. I have ...

The last building trip to Winthrop was filled with summer camp, fairies, inflatable rattle snakes and old friends.   Annabelle got to go to fairy and gnome themed summer camp. She came back everyday covered in glitter and smiles with a metric F load of arts and crafts. F stands for fairy.  She also got invited to her first Winthrop Birthday party which was snake themed. There were about 30 inflatable rattle snakes floating around Perryaguin lake with a matching number of five year old's having the time of their lives, "swimming", splashing and generally trying not to sink by grasping onto as many inflatable rattle snakes as possible.  Annabelle also had her first run in with a rooster with bad behavior, which we nick named "Enchilada" . She survived the ordeal but is eager to eat the rooster.  Besides ensuring Annabelle had an amazing week filled with bountiful little people time we also did a lot of work with the roof. The building is 24 feet high which makes y...

As soon as we got to Winthrop we realized we had forgotten our truck, excavator and toolbox keys.  Thus had denied ourselves access to all our tools and most materials.   Brandon conjured up his old hooligan spirt and started the process of breaking into our "secure" construction site. Using some shims and a library card we were able to nose the truck door open a tiny little bit. Next we stuck a piece of leftover solid ground wire into the door and wiggled it around like a blind folded Miley Cyrus twerking around in a dark room.  Finally on one random twerk, we hit the unlock button. Once inside we now had access to our boxes of fasteners, a spare excavator key and...... a lock picking set.   Once upon a time we had learned lock picking. A skill which was cultivated by the national park service- whom took it upon themselves to lock everything they could think of and more. Vowing to never be locked out of a piece of property on public land (again) we learned a te...